Field
This disclosure relates generally to transmitter front-end blocks, and more specifically, to mixer-driver amplifier implementations of the transmitter front-end block.
Background
The growth of portable wireless devices is driving the requirements for smaller building blocks and electronic components, which entail designing area efficient blocks. In a transmitter of a wireless device, front-end blocks such as up-conversion mixer and driver amplifier are designed to achieve highest gain at the lowest power. However, cascaded stages of the transmitter front-end block may generate higher variation in gain and higher area requirement due to tuned inductor-capacitor (LC) load at the operating frequency. Other configurations of the conventional transmitter front-end block may be limited by the headroom available for a mixer output due to cascode devices. Further, a conversion loss and I-Q combining may produce efficiency loss.